In my experience helping build businesses, one of the main reasons why business leaders become overwhelmed and unfocused is because they aren’t defining their “needle movers” and exclusively working on them.

What is a “Needle Mover”?

I prefer the term Needle Mover as opposed to Goal. Goals are binary—you achieve them and feel great or you don’t and feel lousy. You won’t always achieve the exact result you want. This doesn’t mean you have failed! A result is a result, and it will move your business forward.

Now a Needle Mover is a given RESULT that will have a significant impact on the success of your business. You can break down this RESULT into ACTIONS. Once you determine your Needle Movers and create and follow a plan to achieve them you’ll see daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual results. Tangible results keep you excited, they build and maintain your MOMENTUM

What Will Move The Needle?

We all need help identifying the 3 activities to focus on RIGHT NOW that “move the needle” – meaning that move your business forward from zero to 10 miles per hour, or from 10 to 40 mph, or from 40 to 90 mph. Distilling your business to its essence is key here. Maybe to move your business forward you need to: generate more sales leads, close more sales, train up your team to be self-managed. At any given time, everyone on your team should have needle movers they are focusing on and reporting on. The reason I encourage you to distill your needle movers to only 3 is because each of these 3 activities will have sub-activities beneath them, and 3 key goals is plenty to focus on.

For now, I want us to focus on the specific RESULTS you want, and how to set a TARGET, MINIMUM and MIND BLOWER for each Needle Mover. The TARGET is what you want, the MINIMUM is what you are willing to accept, the MIND BLOWER is what would absolutely Rock Your World!

You will have annual Needle Movers, and you’ll have monthly and quarterly ones to help you achieve your annual ones.

CCA has developed a proprietary “Needle Mover” training and “Motivated Accountability System” to set execution at the highest bar possible. This ensures each strategic initiative is being implemented thoroughly throughout the culture, receiving the highest-level attention possible and allows management to immediately determine any effectiveness leaks in the system. Contact Christine Comaford and Associates today to help with your answers and your questions, Christine Comaford, The Executive Coach